Across the Plains, by Robert Louis Stevenson

Despised Races

Of all stupid ill-feelings, the sentiment of my fellow Caucasians towards our companions in the
Chinese car was the most stupid and the worst. They seemed never to have looked at them, listened to them, or thought
of them, but hated them A PRIORI. The Mongols were their enemies in that cruel and treacherous battle-field of money.
They could work better and cheaper in half a hundred industries, and hence there was no calumny too idle for the
Caucasians to repeat, and even to believe. They declared them hideous vermin, and affected a kind of choking in the
throat when they beheld them. Now, as a matter of fact, the young Chinese man is so like a large class of European
women, that on raising my head and suddenly catching sight of one at a considerable distance, I have for an instant
been deceived by the resemblance. I do not say it is the most attractive class of our women, but for all that many a
man’s wife is less pleasantly favoured. Again, my emigrants declared that the Chinese were dirty. I cannot say they
were clean, for that was impossible upon the journey; but in their efforts after cleanliness they put the rest of us to
shame. We all pigged and stewed in one infamy, wet our hands and faces for half a minute daily on the platform, and
were unashamed. But the Chinese never lost an opportunity, and you would see them washing their feet — an act not
dreamed of among ourselves — and going as far as decency permitted to wash their whole bodies. I may remark by the way
that the dirtier people are in their persons the more delicate is their sense of modesty. A clean man strips in a
crowded boathouse; but he who is unwashed slinks in and out of bed without uncovering an inch of skin. Lastly, these
very foul and malodorous Caucasians entertained the surprising illusion that it was the Chinese waggon, and that alone,
which stank. I have said already that it was the exceptions and notably the freshest of the three.

These judgments are typical of the feeling in all Western America. The Chinese are considered stupid, because they
are imperfectly acquainted with English. They are held to be base, because their dexterity and frugality enable them to
underbid the lazy, luxurious Caucasian. They are said to be thieves; I am sure they have no monopoly of that. They are
called cruel; the Anglo-Saxon and the cheerful Irishman may each reflect before he bears the accusation. I am told,
again, that they are of the race of river pirates, and belong to the most despised and dangerous class in the Celestial
Empire. But if this be so, what remarkable pirates have we here! and what must be the virtues, the industry, the
education, and the intelligence of their superiors at home!

Awhile ago it was the Irish, now it is the Chinese that must go. Such is the cry. It seems, after all, that no
country is bound to submit to immigration any more than to invasion; each is war to the knife, and resistance to either
but legitimate defence. Yet we may regret the free tradition of the republic, which loved to depict herself with open
arms, welcoming all unfortunates. And certainly, as a man who believes that he loves freedom, I may be excused some
bitterness when I find her sacred name misused in the contention. It was but the other day that I heard a vulgar fellow
in the Sand-lot, the popular tribune of San Francisco, roaring for arms and butchery. “At the call of Abraham Lincoln,”
said the orator, “ye rose in the name of freedom to set free the negroes; can ye not rise and liberate yourselves from
a few dirty Mongolians?”

For my own part, I could not look but with wonder and respect on the Chinese. Their forefathers watched the stars
before mine had begun to keep pigs. Gun-powder and printing, which the other day we imitated, and a school of manners
which we never had the delicacy so much as to desire to imitate, were theirs in a long-past antiquity. They walk the
earth with us, but it seems they must be of different clay. They hear the clock strike the same hour, yet surely of a
different epoch. They travel by steam conveyance, yet with such a baggage of old Asiatic thoughts and superstitions as
might check the locomotive in its course. Whatever is thought within the circuit of the Great Wall; what the wry-eyed,
spectacled schoolmaster teaches in the hamlets round Pekin; religions so old that our language looks a halfing boy
alongside; philosophy so wise that our best philosophers find things therein to wonder at; all this travelled alongside
of me for thousands of miles over plain and mountain. Heaven knows if we had one common thought or fancy all that way,
or whether our eyes, which yet were formed upon the same design, beheld the same world out of the railway windows. And
when either of us turned his thoughts to home and childhood, what a strange dissimilarity must there not have been in
these pictures of the mind — when I beheld that old, gray, castled city, high throned above the firth, with the flag of
Britain flying, and the red-coat sentry pacing over all; and the man in the next car to me would conjure up some junks
and a pagoda and a fort of porcelain, and call it, with the same affection, home.

Another race shared among my fellow-passengers in the disfavour of the Chinese; and that, it is hardly necessary to
say, was the noble red man of old story — over whose own hereditary continent we had been steaming all these days. I
saw no wild or independent Indian; indeed, I hear that such avoid the neighbourhood of the train; but now and again at
way stations, a husband and wife and a few children, disgracefully dressed out with the sweepings of civilisation, came
forth and stared upon the emigrants. The silent stoicism of their conduct, and the pathetic degradation of their
appearance, would have touched any thinking creature, but my fellow-passengers danced and jested round them with a
truly Cockney baseness. I was ashamed for the thing we call civilisation. We should carry upon our consciences so much,
at least, of our forefathers’ misconduct as we continue to profit by ourselves.

If oppression drives a wise man mad, what should be raging in the hearts of these poor tribes, who have been driven
back and back, step after step, their promised reservations torn from them one after another as the States extended
westward, until at length they are shut up into these hideous mountain deserts of the centre — and even there find
themselves invaded, insulted, and hunted out by ruffianly diggers? The eviction of the Cherokees (to name but an
instance), the extortion of Indian agents, the outrages of the wicked, the ill-faith of all, nay, down to the ridicule
of such poor beings as were here with me upon the train, make up a chapter of injustice and indignity such as a man
must be in some ways base if his heart will suffer him to pardon or forget. These old, well-founded, historical hatreds
have a savour of nobility for the independent. That the Jew should not love the Christian, nor the Irishman love the
English, nor the Indian brave tolerate the thought of the American, is not disgraceful to the nature of man; rather,
indeed, honourable, since it depends on wrongs ancient like the race, and not personal to him who cherishes the
indignation.